Curse of Slate Rock Manor, an independently produced English language doujin mystery visual novel, has been released, and is proving to be quite well received.

The game itself takes the form of a branching supernatural mystery yarn, with the protagonist being tasked with retrieving her missing boyfriend from a foreboding manor; the story has been praised for its atmosphere, and production values are, for a doujin title, quite good.

It also has both a cat and a maid as major characters.

This, coupled with its low price and the sheer rarity of natively produced English language visual novels, may recommend the game to fans of the genre – the game is available now.

The voice acting is shit, the art is generic and they sometimes can’t keep the proportions straight, the writing is bad (it includes stage directions like “gets interrupted”), it can’t keep its tone straight (if it’s a horror game, why the comedy Jewish stereotype accent and talk about hemorrhoids?), and merely boils down to Choose Your Own Adventure.

Also doujin, but a million times better and won’t be asking $20 for it.

The people who did this one don’t even seem to know how to program. I had to look at their website to find out how to turn off the godawful voice-acting because there isn’t an “options” menu. And doing so also muted sound effects like the phone ringing.

*ahem*
Artefact said: “The biggest doujin game is Touhou, a game with awful graphics, no real story and questionable gameplay – under the circumstances I think we are justified in cutting these developers some slack.”
*ahem* #2
I wish to know what YOU think is pretty graphics then because in the unlikely case you have ever played any of the actual shooter games instead of only watching shitty IOSYS videos on youtube, you should have noticed that unlike pretty much every other shmup EVER, Touhou is very pleasing to the eye. Questionable gameplay? Dude, it’s a shmup. You shoot legions of enemies with whatever weapons you have. There is not much room to change that, apart from extra logics in the various games. As for story, if you don’t bother to read the manuals and side material but, again, only watch shitty videos on youtube, then of course you know nothing about the story.

The idea of going easy on this hacked together thing because it’s doujin looks pretty silly since Katawa Shoujo is also doujin but has vastly higher standards in all regards.

And let’s not forget they want money for this. If it were free, I still wouldn’t like it, but I find the idea that they think that borrowed art high-school-level-voice-acted Choose Your Own Adventure on a freeware VN engine is worth $20 pretty annoying.

http://vndb.org/v/all?q=&fil=olang-en
Plenty of OELVNs.
In 2011 alone, 24 OELVNs were released that have been listed on vndb…and that’s only the ones listed on vndb. Most OELVNs never get an entry there.
Not counting Katawa Shoujo, the highest rated OELVN (Witches and Woodlands, an Umineko fanfic) has a 7.16. When sorting by rating, it takes 6 pages (of 50 VNs each) to reach such a low rating, and VNs with few votes (like most non-popular Japanese VNs) don’t get in the top scores because of the bayesian rating system. You end up around the titles generally considered to be mediocre. And that’s the very best of OELVNs.

‘Prejudice’ is when you form an opinion about something without sufficient information. I have tried enough OELVNs to be able to judge that they are indeed shit, and many people agree with me. Just take a look at the Lemmasoft Forums to see where the problem lies. These people are carebears who praise eachother regardless of how shitty their productions are. Ambition is lacking entirely, and criticism is a foreign concept to them.

Because Katawa Shoujo exists and is free this is rubbish? I don’t follow your logic.

Nobody paid us anything – it should be plain the developers don’t have the money to, even if they wanted. They tipped us about the game, we offered a short post, and I checked with those who had played it as to whether it was worth posting about. “OELVNs” are a sufficiently rare occurrence as to warrant an occasional post. I won’t even comment on your seething prejudice against English language visual novels.

The biggest doujin game is Touhou, a game with awful graphics, no real story and questionable gameplay – under the circumstances I think we are justified in cutting these developers some slack.

Well received? This game hasn’t even gotten a single vote on vndb so far. Maybe it’s been well-received in the circlejerk OELVN community, but this is the first time I’ve heard of the title.

It doesn’t have ‘good production values for a doujin game’, there are plenty of doujin games with art as good as this one, and even plenty of doujin games with much better art.

Higurashi is only flaky in art, everything else is done well. Contrast this game, which like almost every single OELVN out there, does everything wrong. It doesn’t even rise above the huge pile of crap known as OELVNs, let alone be any good as a VN in general.

I wonder what the hell made you post this, Artefact. Did they pay you to advertise their game or something?

I don’t particularly like anything about this so far, but trying to put some support behind the idea of making English VN’s is definitely worth my 10 US$… and you know… might end up not that bad in a Scooby-Doo kind of way ¬¬

Mongrels what did I tell you, the first strike was Miku being accepted into some >random<:3 car company, now the Americans have begun to experiment with visual novels *laughs* Moe shall REIGN SUPREME!!!

Nice art btw, like I said it's only the start start, all according to keikaku! Soon the world will just be one big Japan *laughs maniacally and coughs*

Ummm… GOOD Visual novels can still have porn and not bring to mind the porn.

Fuck, Sengoku Rance is almost completely porn, but the GAMEPLAY is fantastic, and the story isn’t bad either. Not to say that the porn part isn’t fantastic, but I actually think that the game itself outshines it’s pornyness. /shrug

Wow we really need more title like Higurashi and Fate cause hopefully in the future when we think visual novel we don’t just think of the porn <.<

I porn is Good but Plot is better this could be another good way for new authors(outside of Japan) to sell their work (a little something in between a movie and novel or something like that) anyway good news is good

The Pokémon Mansion in Cinnabar Island doesn’t have a Poké Ball sculped on its roof. Just look at its exterior design in FireRed and LeafGreen. But what you said still makes some sense in terms of comparison, though 😛

I’m not really interested in this, but the characters look relatively good for a non Japanese game. Usually when I see anime style characters drawn by someone who isn’t Japanese, it is painfully obvious that the artist isn’t Japanese. It’s like white people have a mental block that keeps them from properly drawing in this certain style. At least this game looks like it could have been drawn by a Japanese guy. That doesn’t change the fact whether this is a good game or not though. Being Japanese or not doesn’t make something automatically good or bad.

I’ve played plenty. I should have been clearer, but I meant in terms of writing. The only VN that can come close to 999 caliber is Ever 17, but that had the same writers. And even then, the pacing in that game is off-putting, the atmosphere falls flat of griping, and the characters barely have any depth to them.

non-ero VN’s can be good too, since you’re playing them for the story and not for fap material. But, since it’s English only it obviously has either english audio or no audio at all, I wouldn’t play a game like this <.<. Just staring at anime character and hearing them speak english would destroy my ears.